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Left to right going upstairs Jennifer King, Laura Arrillaga, Chuck Slaughter, Daniel Lurie, Noosheen Hashemi and Trevor Traina. Philanthropists in the home of Jennifer King donated for community use for kids called "Foundation House" Photographer:
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Cake decorator Tammy Griffin puts finishing touches on a chocolate cake at the Rubicon Bakery in Richmond, which is supported by young philanthropists. Chronicle photo by Eric Luse

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Jason Murphy,(hat on backwards) consultant and educator heads up a Mind Body Awareness Project at Santa Cruz Junvenile Hall. He takes them through meditaiton and some YOGA during the class. Most of the youth are held for serious violations. Photographer:
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,Noosheen Hashemi Philanthropists in the home of Jennifer King donated for community use for kids called "Foundation House" Photographer:
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Trevor Traina Philanthropists in the home of Jennifer King donated for community use for kids called "Foundation House" Photographer:
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Chuck Slaughter Philanthropists in the home of Jennifer King donated for community use for kids called "Foundation House" Photographer:
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Jennifer King Philanthropists in the home of Jennifer King donated for community use for kids called "Foundation House" Photographer:
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Daniel Lurie Philanthropists in the home of Jennifer King donated for community use for kids called "Foundation House" Photographer:
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CLASS ACTS / A new breed of young Bay Area philanthropists redefines the meaning -- and methods -- of giving

On any given weekday, Thrive House, a wood-shingled Edwardian at Broderick and Eddy streets, is a place for disadvantaged children, who are tutored, counseled and taught a variety of life skills there after school.

But on a recent Thursday, one 12-year-old had the place to herself -- in part because several other children were truant.

"Michelle" (not her real name, which is being withheld to protect her privacy) is struggling in her classes. She skips out or falls asleep at her desk. "Sometimes I talk on the phone from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m.," she boasted.

But with the house to herself, the fifth-grader, who has four siblings, basked in the attention of her mentor, Thuy Nguyen, and led visitors on a tour, marveling at the closet space before repairing to the kitchen, where she learned to make a pot of macaroni and cheese.

"I like coming here because we have fun," she said.

Jennifer King, an Internet entrepreneur and investor who founded the nonprofit in July, couldn't be happier about the impact Thrive House has had on children's lives.

"Watching a kid make a meal in the house is what it's all about," she said. "The kids have a sense of accomplishment, sitting down to eat with their mentor and with other kids in the house, creating a sense of community."

As California's philanthropic landscape matures, it is catching up -- with Silicon Valley money -- to the long-established charitable scene on the East Coast, where the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations have long been staples of civic life.

Nowadays, it seems that everyone younger than 45 has his or her own nonprofit or foundation -- or at least pet cause -- judging from the never-ending stream of invitations to luncheons, cocktail parties and other functions that promise to spare the rain forest, prevent animal abuse or otherwise help save the world.

From 1999 to 2004, the number of foundations in California grew from 4,208 to 6,242, an increase of nearly 50 percent, surpassing the national growth of 35 percent, according to a recent study by the Foundation Center in New York, which tracks philanthropic giving. Santa Clara County -- high tech's ground zero -- had the largest growth in the state, 148 percent, with 292 foundations formed.

Though the center does not track donors' ages, a growing number in the Bay Area's younger set are leading their peers into philanthropic efforts, spurred in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's unprecedented efforts to tackle global health issues and financier Warren Buffett's historic $1.5 billion contribution to the Gates Foundation this year.

Some are creating new types of foundations by borrowing business models used in the venture capital world. Others are creating projects more appealing to their friends than conventional institutional programs. And those without millions are putting what they do have -- time and effort -- into innovative nonprofits, hoping that their successes will make it hip to do good.

"This is really the first time in history where a lifetime of wealth creation can happen to an individual in their 20s or 30s," said Laura Arrillaga, 36, a Stanford University business school lecturer who teaches strategic philanthropy and who in 1998 started her own foundation, Silicon Valley Social Ventures, known as SV2. "The wealth generation is dramatically more rapid in Silicon Valley, as opposed to traditional economic structures, where it'd take an individual 65 years to amass enough wealth to start giving back to society.

"These are individuals who are creators, changemakers, proactive in reshaping the way things are done across all industries, so it makes sense they'd change the way philanthropy is done."

Peter Hero is the former president of Community Foundation Silicon Valley in San Jose. It blossomed from a foundation with $8 million in assets in 1989 -- much of it from donated high-tech stocks -- to the fourth-largest community foundation in the nation, with just under $1 billion in assets, thanks to a recent merger with the Peninsula Community Foundation. Hero saw a dramatic change in the ways of giving by the young during his 17-year tenure.

"The era of people writing a check to the American Cancer Society is over among newer wealthy people," he said. "They're hands-on and have an investment mentality, asking, 'Where's the greatest return on my investment and how will I know it?' "

Arrillaga, the daughter of a Peninsula real estate billionaire, came up with the idea for SV2 while getting her master's degree in business administration, and she founded it while earning two master's degrees simultaneously -- one in education and another in art history -- at Stanford. She spent 40 to 60 hours a week on the nonprofit while in school, sleeping three to four hours a night.

She was motivated, in part, by the desire to establish an identity and credibility outside her successful father's shadow, and in part by the death of her mother, who administered the Arrillaga Family Foundation and sat on 36 other nonprofit boards.

Arrillaga saw that people her own age with budding technology fortunes -- "new-generation philanthropists" -- wanted to give but didn't know how or where to do it. Many had come from out of state, with no ties to local schools or churches and no mentors to help them distribute their wealth.

But they understood business, so SV2 made sense. The fund applies the principles of venture capital: putting cash into a startup, sitting on its board of directors and monitoring performance for a return on the investment. In this case, however, the startups are nonprofits, the donors act as business consultants, and the return on investment is judged by measurable performance results, rather than profits.

Donors to SV2 are called "partners" and join with a minimum contribution of $2,500. Today, the fund has more than 160 partners, including Arrillaga's husband of three months, Netscape co-founder and Opsware Chairman Marc Andreessen, 35; Jeff Skoll, 41, the first president of eBay; Steven Kirsch, 50, founder of InfoSeek; and Jerry Yang, 38, co-founder of Yahoo.

More than $2 million has been granted to a variety of educational, health and environmental programs, including Fresh Lifelines for Youth, a mentoring program for at-risk teens in San Jose; RotaCare free clinic in Mountain View; and Acterra: Action for a Sustainable Earth in Palo Alto.

Arrillaga, a tall, tenacious woman who eschews makeup, showy jewelry and flashy clothing, says the hardest challenge has not been getting people to write checks, but getting them personally involved. Educational seminars, volunteer events and family events have been supplemented with "affinity groups," where partners come up with their own philanthropic projects -- in foster care or global issues, for example, and then find other partners interested in working on the project, bring in speakers to educate donors on the issue and make grants with SV2 money.

Daniel Lurie, 29, of San Francisco also founded his own nonprofit. His Tipping Point Community is modeled after the Robin Hood Foundation in New York, an enormously successful group created by commodities trader Paul Tudor Jones II to enlist well-heeled friends to raise money for programs that fight poverty.

Lurie is the son of Rabbi Brian Lurie and Mimi Haas, and the stepson of the late Levi Strauss & Co. executive Peter Haas. He worked on the 2000 presidential campaign of U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley, and was taken with Bradley's belief that people should want to be part of something bigger than themselves. Tipping Point gives young donors a place to make their first foray into the charity world by taking on issues of poverty and class. The Tipping Point board of directors, on which Lurie sits, determines which programs will receive money and how much. Among those receiving grants: the Homeless Prenatal Program, which helps low-income mothers; Rubicon Programs, a job-training program in Richmond; and Build, a program that helps low-income teens do better in school and assists them with starting their own businesses.

All the money donated goes toward the programs, Lurie said, and the board of directors pays for staff salaries out of its own pockets. Some $891,000 was raised from 100 donors -- young and well established alike -- for eight programs during the first year.

Raising funds to help the poor is not easy, despite statistics showing that 1 in 10 Bay Area residents lives in poverty.

"Sometimes it's easier to sell the arts and a museum building you can walk through to see the art than to appeal for donations to end poverty," Lurie said. "When you see a homeless person on Sixth Street, there's a sense of hopelessness about it -- there's no building you can go to, to see the depths of poverty."

Trevor Traina, 38, a technology entrepreneur and art collector who sits on the Fine Arts Museums board of directors (chaired by his mother, Dede Wilsey), created a new black-tie ball for young people in 2004 after realizing that it was up to people his age to turn peers into patrons.

Traina, who lived for a time in New York and belonged to museum party committees, copied the Frick Museum's Young Fellows ball -- a staple of Park Avenue society -- in hopes that a glitzy local event with big-ticket prices would be a smash. (Similarly, SFMOMA created an event in recent years, the two-tier-ticket Modern Ball, to bring young donors into the fold.)

It took months for Traina and three socially prominent co-chairs to secure sponsors for food, beverage, gifts and decor, develop a guest list and send out invitations to their friends in their 30s. They even borrowed tablecloths from his mother and put pressure on Sotheby's, where his parents have spent vast amounts of money, to become a sponsor.

"We wanted to go from nothing to an incredible party from day one, and if the party wasn't great, we'd have missed the chance to rope them in -- no one's going to go a second year to a party that was bad the first year," Traina said. "In five or 10 years, we'll have missed the window. They'll be attached to other causes."

The first ball of the Junior Committee netted $80,000, Traina said, noting that this spring, the third annual ball netted roughly $200,000, and it has become the largest single-night fundraiser at the museum.

"There is occasionally a bias against cultural institutions because they're perceived as not having as much of an impact in people's lives, but (they are) very deserving of our support and add tremendously to the vibrancy of our community," said Traina, who collects Remington bronzes, paintings of the Hudson River school and photography.

"The new de Young had over 1.3 million visitors in its first year, twice the population of San Francisco. It also has the largest classroom space of any museum in America, 40,000 square feet. In a day when public schools are cutting back on art, we educate.

"The Academy of Sciences is being rebuilt; SFMOMA is a great museum," he added. "We have the oldest ballet company in the nation, a great opera and a great symphony. It's the difference between being a small town and an international destination."

Even so, the most popular causes in foundation giving in California are health care and education, according to the Foundation Center's report "California Foundations: An Update on the State's Grantmaking Community," released in November.

The analysis sampled 1,172 of the nation's largest foundations in 2004 to determine patterns in giving and compared the results with patterns from 1999 and previous years. The sample included 119 California foundations, representing 46 percent of donations by all foundations in the state.

Roughly 24 percent of giving in 2004 went to health, while nearly 19 percent went to education. On a national scale, California foundations gave larger shares of grant dollars to health, environment and wildlife, science and technology, and religion than their counterparts across the county. They gave smaller shares to arts and culture, human services, civil rights and community development, and social sciences than other U.S. foundations.

Funding for overseas programs -- primarily dealing with the environment, international affairs, development and peace and security -- increased by 73 percent during the same time period, largely because of contributions by the Hewlett and Moore foundations, according to the report.

Chuck Slaughter, 43, of Sausalito, founder of TravelSmith Outfitters, is creating a nonprofit to help impoverished African villages. His venture, Living Goods, will teach women to sell health care products such as mosquito nets, contraceptives and water treatment tablets in their neighborhoods, in much the way Avon ladies peddle beauty products to their friends.

Although for decades media reports have detailed the way foreign charity is diverted from the needy to corrupt governments, Slaughter saw for himself that it doesn't have to be so.

In 1988, after college and a failed attempt to become a documentary filmmaker, Slaughter came across a story in the New York Times about Trickle Up, an organization that provided seed money to people in developing nations who wanted to start small businesses. It was long before the term "micro-enterprise" was a buzzword and Muhammad Yunus won a Nobel Prize for issuing microcredit in Bangladesh.

"It seemed like a lot more direct way to make a difference," he recalled. So he went to work for the group, visiting Asia along the way and seeing entrepreneurs at work in a range of activities from running tea stands to sewing dresses.

Three years later, he created TravelSmith. He sold his interest in the company in 2004 and since then has been an active investor in a variety of catalog companies and worked with a nonprofit called Healthstore, which helped Kenyans set up medical dispensaries in their villages.

That in turn inspired him to start Living Goods in Uganda. He is developing a partnership with BRAC, an anti-poverty organization based in Bangladesh, to recruit women from the poorest villages and give them $100 to $200 loans to start selling health care products in their neighborhoods. BRAC already is funding female-run businesses in Uganda through hundreds of "solidarity circles" -- groups of 20 to 30 women who receive loans to start small businesses. He has made several trips to Uganda in recent months to find prospective saleswomen to start in May. He hopes to have a workforce of 3,000 within five years.

At a recent meeting with 20 women in a slum outside Kampala, Slaughter, a married father of two, was asked whether Living Goods would offer child sponsorships -- to help feed and educate children -- by one of the women, who was caring for a child whose parents had both died of AIDS.

He asked how many others were doing the same, and 90 percent of the women raised their hands.

"It stopped me dead," Slaughter said. "I was a bit in horror that that many families had been affected. There's a big difference that can be made if you do nothing else than improve distribution and uptake of condoms."

In Atherton, Noosheen Hashemi, 43, an Iranian-born business executive and former vice president of finance for U.S. operations at Oracle Corp., is using her economics background to guide her international philanthropy.

Hashemi was sent by her parents at age 14 to live with her brother in San Jose in 1977, two years before the Iranian revolution unseated the Shah. She earned an economics degree from San Jose State University and went to work at Oracle in 1985, helping guide a financial turnaround for the company after it was hit with class-action shareholder lawsuits in 1990 and forced to restate earnings in 1991.

Today, she's a "retired" mother of two, married to Farzad Nazem, the chief technology officer at Yahoo. She's also created three nonprofit groups and sits on the board of a fourth, devoting 70 hours a week to her causes.

Hashemi's interests revolve around using economic development to fight global instability, and preventing child abuse. "It doesn't make good sense to solve all problems with military solutions -- at the end of the day, stability is an economics issue," she said. "Whether it's Oakland, Egypt or Afghanistan, if millions of 18-year-olds don't have jobs, they're going to be up to all sorts of mischief."

Her newest cause is promoting civic participation by Iranian Americans and supporting Persian arts and culture in the United States with the PARSA Community Foundation, which she founded nine months ago.

The foundation, the only one of its kind in the world, she said, already has a $7 million endowment and six donor-advised funds, the result of Hashemi's dogged cold calls and visits to financially successful Iranians in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Florida, New York and London.

"Can you imagine calling people to ask them for $1 million?" said Hashemi, an exacting and precise person who throws tea parties for friends with the same attention to detail she used in poring over Oracle's books. "I had never asked anybody for anything in my life. I'd worked to get a salary. I paid for dinner when I took my billionaire friends to dinner."

PARSA made its first grant in September, giving $210,000 to Ashoka, an international program in Virginia. Ashoka gives seed money to entrepreneurs in disadvantaged countries to start programs that address social problems, such as dispute resolution centers in Nigeria, self-help movements for disabled street beggars in Ghana and drug rehabilitation centers in Peru. Ashoka will select an entrepreneur of Persian descent and award the money to him or her for use in a social engineering project.

PARSA's mission is, in some ways, a delicate sell. Other nonprofits can pump money directly into programs in Asia, South America and Africa. Some PARSA donors would like to support programs for youth, the disabled and the environment in Iran. But legal sanctions prohibit American citizens from conducting financial transactions there.

"We can't send money to build hospitals or universities," Hashemi said. "So for PARSA, we're essentially trying to promote philanthropy in our local communities, to give to the adopted country that gave us opportunities, that we love, and then we want to make sure that our donors give to the Persian community, and maybe some day we can form chapters in other countries."

King, the Internet entrepreneur, put her business acumen to work in philanthropy as well -- but locally.

The San Francisco resident founded a company in 1985 that became Biospace.com, a leading biotech Web portal, in 1995. In 2001 she founded Rugged Elegance, an online business that promotes "soulful living." She uses personal investments to help fund her family's Thrive Foundation, which was founded 10 years ago by King and her husband, Tim Fredel, her brother and sister and their spouses, and her parents, all of whom contribute financially. It focuses on youth development.

King, now 46, started Thrive House this summer in the house where she, her husband and two children had lived for years. Thanks to a stock windfall -- King said she and her family were the initial investors in Baidu, Google's Chinese rival -- they were able to move to a nicer neighborhood, but were torn about selling the home.

King's personal trainer, Antony Thier, came up with a novel idea: Why not keep the house, continue to pay the mortgage and turn it into a study hall for kids from nearby housing projects? A San Francisco Housing Authority official loved the idea and helped King set up a monthlong pilot program in July.

So Thrive House, run by the local chapter of the nonprofit Friends of the Children, was born.

"We had lived in this area that is technically called Anza Vista -- many people refer to it as the Western Addition -- for 15 years, and it is amazing to me that after all this time, this neck of the woods is not getting safer," King said. "When Antony proposed this concept of creating a home for underserved kids in the city, the house seemed to be a natural space to run life-skills programs for kids."

King's interest in helping children stems from her personal life. Both of her children have Type 1 diabetes. Her relatives -- a sister who is a pastor; her sister's husband, also a pastor; her brother, a filmmaker; and his wife, also a pastor -- manage the Thrive Foundation along with King's parents, and all decided that children and adolescents would be the focus of their philanthropy.

King has made donations to Hope Unlimited, which takes child prostitutes and drug addicts off the streets of Brazil. The Thrive Foundation has given $1 million each to Fuller Seminary, Stanford's Center for Adolescent Development and the Search Institute in Minneapolis.

But Thrive House is at the center of King's universe right now, maybe -- the ever-smiling, energetic entrepreneur suggested -- because the universe wants it that way.

"In the 1960s, this house was a home for emotionally disturbed girls," she said. "It's like the house has a soul and it's saying, 'I want to come back to being used in this way.' "

Those who can't donate millions in tech fortunes are donating spirit.

Isaiah Seret, a 29-year-old independent filmmaker in San Francisco who travels to India for movie projects and meditation retreats, co-founded the Mind Body Awareness Project in 2000. The nonprofit sends teachers to juvenile halls to teach adolescents to meditate, so they can learn how to control their impulses and see that they have choices about how to react -- or not react -- to their thoughts.

"I believe the basic nature of people is good, even if their life circumstances may not be," Seret said. "If these kids just have opportunities to know themselves, it can help their goodness come right out."

Seret attended the California Institute of Integral Studies and co-founded the program with two classmates and two other friends. Some of them had experimented with drugs in their younger days and turned to meditation as a way to cope. One of them, Noah Levine, wrote the book "Dharma Punx," a memoir of his turn-around from skate punk-thief-drug addict to Buddhist meditation teacher.

Levine began teaching at a nonprofit that taught meditation at juvenile halls in Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties, and asked Seret, then 21, to join him. The kids went from tough-talking fidgeters and fighters to relaxed individuals in an hour's time.

"They're so hopeless in a lot of ways," said Seret, haltingly, as if it physically pained him to express the sentiment. "They have nothing. Teaching them meditation is giving them something. The heart of self-respect is to be able to make some decisions in your life."

Seeing nothing similar in San Francisco or Alameda counties, Seret and Levine created Mind Body Awareness to fill the gap. In 2005, MBA merged with the group serving Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties.

MBA teaches 50 classes in four counties on a $150,000 annual operating budget. Seret's own troubled past -- running with a hip-hop crowd and struggling with alcohol and marijuana while in film school in Los Angeles -- gave him credibility with the young offenders.

"All the founders felt that we could be these kids who we were teaching in juvenile hall," Seret said. "We felt we were in a unique position to work with them, whereas many of the staff at juvenile hall didn't really see anything good in them. It's a buck-the-system, do-it-yourself attitude we have. We can't sit around and expect other people to save us, or to actually help young people."

PROFILE / Noosheen Hashemi

Thinking big was part of the culture at Oracle Corp., where Hashemi was an executive, with chief executive Larry Ellison as a model.

After engineering a financial turnaround for the company in 1991, she left in 1995 and a year later went to work at Quote.com. She left a year later to start a family with her husband, Farzad Nazem, chief technology officer at Yahoo, and they founded the HAND Foundation, with two goals: fighting childhood sexual abuse and building the middle class in developing nations.

Hashemi also created a nonprofit online magazine called Forsat.org that helps budding entrepreneurs in the Farsi-speaking world, some 90 million people in Afghanistan, Central Asia and elsewhere. Farsi has no word for entrepreneur, but forsat means opportunity. She is also on the board of the New America Foundation, a public policy institute, and MIT's Iranian studies program.

Hashemi's newest project is the PARSA Community Foundation, which supports Persian arts, culture and civic engagement in the Persian diaspora. "Five of seven board members at PARSA are under 45. We are now beyond the financial part of the American dream -- we're pursuing the other part of the American dream, which is doing something worthwhile with your money," Hashemi said. "The Lamborghini is not the whole American dream. The whole American dream is the one Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are living."

PROFILE / Trevor Traina

As a fifth-generation San Franciscan, Trevor Traina, 38, feels not only proud of the city, but a sense of responsibility to it.

He comes from a family of wealth -- his mother, Dede Wilsey, is a Dow Chemical heiress and his stepmother is Danielle Steel -- but he is an Internet entrepreneur and a philanthropist in his own right.

Traina, who founded CompareNet -- later sold to Microsoft -- and SchemaLogic, where he is chairman, is on the board of three startups and invests in restaurants and lounges statewide. He's also on the board of six nonprofit groups -- including Vision of Hope, a Catholic group providing schooling for inner-city children; Venetian Heritage, a U.S.-based group that raises money to restore monuments in Venice; and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

To put the museums on the radars of people younger than his parents, he created a pricey fundraising ball for his age group.

"It's a conundrum -- we're one of the great cities of the world, up with Paris and London, and yet, if you look at the numbers, we don't belong," he said. "We don't have the economy, we don't have the population of 10 million like London. Everyone who does live here and cares has to work twice as hard, pedal the bicycle twice as fast, to support the museums."

PROFILE / Chuck Slaughter

Chuck Slaughter, 43, created TravelSmith Outfitters in his living room in Menlo Park in 1991. In 2004, he sold his interest to a large publishing company. Within a year, he was traveling again.

A friend told him about the HealthStore Foundation in Minneapolis and its Kenya-based Child and Family Wellness Shops -- business franchises operated by villagers who sell essential drugs to rural populations. He joined the group's board for two years. That experience was the inspiration for Living Goods, a Ugandan program that trains village women to go door-to-door, selling products that improve health and quality of life.

Startup costs will run about $200 per person, for inventory, backpacks, uniforms, storage cabinets and perhaps a bicycle for transportation; each salesperson is targeted to earn up to $500 a year -- a respectable income in a country where per capita annual income averages $280. "Twenty years from now, my hope is that Living Goods is as big as Avon," Slaughter said. "If the lady going door-to-door can't make a profit, she won't spend time on it; there will be no health benefit."

Stateside causes are important, he said, but "my own resources are limited. Every hour and dollar I invest there will go farther overseas than here."

PROFILE / Jennifer King

Among the projects that San Francisco Internet entrepreneur Jennifer King and her family's Thrive Foundation fund is research on adolescent development at academic institutions -- the first step toward creating programs that can be put into effect across the nation.

"We're not just going to give the nonprofit a check, we're going to build synergies, too," she said. "That's why we focus our funding half on research and half on applications."

Thrive Foundation works with Stanford University's Center for Adolescent Development, where graduate students develop online tools, including a "Thrive-o-gram" that parents, teachers and mentors can use to better understand kids.

King, 46, and her family have also funded research at Fuller Seminary's Center for Research in Child and Adolescent Development. The result: the Fuller Youth Initiative, a three-year, multimillion-dollar program funded by the U.S. Department of Justice that tries to prevent youth violence in Pasadena.

Her philanthropic approach comes from the heart, but her approach is all business: "As a result of the relationships we have on the research side and investments we're making there, we can accomplish so much more in a shorter period of time."

PROFILE / Isaiah Seret

When he was in high school in Santa Fe, students were required to volunteer; in college, Isaiah Seret learned that volunteering could be a calling.

After volunteering to teach meditation at a Santa Cruz juvenile hall, Seret, two college classmates and two other friends founded the Mind Body Awareness Project to teach the practice in Bay Area juvenile halls.

Professor Emeritus Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, who created the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program used in prisons, corporations and schools across the nation and world, is on MBA's advisory board.

MBA expanded so quickly that it had to curtail some classes to stay afloat. But financial capital isn't all it needs. Without human capital, the program would not have worked, either.

"There are young people who ... don't necessarily have a fortune to back their projects, just raw determination to make a change," Seret said. "That's the subset I belong to."

His activities have had an unexpected side benefit. His father, Ira, who spent 15 years in Afghanistan buying rugs, furniture and textiles and sells them at Seret & Sons gallery in Santa Fe, was so inspired by his son's efforts that he started his own nonprofit. The Jindag Foundation is working to restore war-torn Istalif, a village outside Kabul famous as an artists' colony, and to feed and provide first aid to monks in Tibet.